California, who regard turtles as an edible
symbol of long life.
Supplying these markets is a small-scale,
backwoods sort of business. "The trappers
sometimes remind me of the Clampetts,"
a woman named Sheila Millard Perry told
me, the Clampetts being television hillbillies.
Perry presides over Millard's Turtle Farm
of Birmingham, Iowa, the largest snapping
turtle dealer in the nation. Then she added:
"My family sometimes reminds me of the
Clampetts." The business operates out of a
ramshackle assortment of sheds, trailers,
and rough-dug ponds in the rolling Iowa
hills, and Perry, who used to be a nurse, was
wearing denim short shorts rolled up, a
torn T-shirt, and white rubber galoshes. The
family skinned 137,158 pounds of snapping
turtles in 1997, she said. She buys live turtles
at 60 cents a pound and sells at $3.50 on the
bone, $5.75 boneless. It did not appear to be
a get-rich-quick sort of business.
Perry took me on a tour of the property
to show me some of the turtle by-products.
Big shells were drying in the sun on a shed
roof, to be sold to arts and crafts types who
make them into clocks, saddlebags, breast
shields, and Indian dream catchers. The smaller
ones become rattles and drinking flasks. The
belly plates get turned into knife sheaths.
The liver becomes catfish bait. Paws get sewn
into pouches. Claws become necklace parts,
and a couple of throat bones get glued onto
muskrat skulls to sell as Texas longhorn car
mirror ornaments at three dollars apiece.
"My father says the only thing out of the
snapping turtle that he hasn't figured out how
to sell," said Perry, "is the snap."
Researchers have argued that snapping tur
tles cannot sustain a commercial trade because
they are slow to reach reproductive age, and
when they do, they lose most of their nests to
predators. The females usually bury their eggs
in a dirt bank in May or June, and raccoons,
skunks, and foxes promptly dig them up. A
raccoon will sometimes treat a snapping turtle
on the nest like a vending machine, sitting
behind her and palming the eggs up into its
mouth as they come out. Even if they survive to
emerge in August, the hatchlings, which are the
size of soda-bottle caps, may get eaten by birds,
bass, and other predators.
Even so, common snapping turtles appear to
be thriving in most of their range. This may be
because the market for snappers is small, and
there is no incentive to overharvest. Rogers says
he typically leaves a pond idle for five or six
years between harvests to allow for recovery.
But he argues that the turtles also do well on
their own. Over more than 30 years, Rogers
told me, he has taken 36,000 pounds of
common snappers out of a single 200-acre
waterfowl refuge in Massachusetts. A week
after we talked, he went back to the refuge and
found another thousand pounds of turtle
ready for harvest.
O OWN IN LOUISIANA, where the alligator
snappers are not thriving, Brent Harrel
was making a careful study of trap num
ber two. "This is going to be an ordeal,"
he said, indicating the large male alligator
snapper inside. "These boys are tough to fool
with. When we pull him up, he's going to be
real aggravated."
It took both of us hauling on the hoop net to
bring him to the surface, because of his weight
and because he was lurching and tearing at the
net. We drew him up a little more, and he sud
denly clamped his jaw on the gunwale as if to
shred the aluminum. We hesitated, regarding
each other with raised eyebrows, then hauled
the net over the side into the bottom of the
boat. The tattered remains of the baitfish
swung into range, and the turtle lunged again.
His mouth closed on the skull of a buffalofish.
The hollow sound of bone caving in echoed
around the boat.
"This is real stressful for him," Harrel said,
which, under the circumstances, was either
wonderfully magnanimous or pure projection.
Harrel reached in and grabbed hold of a hind
leg. Drawing the turtle back out through the
narrow throat of the trap was like trying to
wrestle an angry fat woman out of an under
sized girdle. But he succeeded after a while.
The turtle's shell was two feet long, and he
weighed 95 pounds. He had a smooth, wizened
snout and a head like a rottweiler, 23 inches
around. We flipped him onto his back, and his
wrinkly, tubercled underflesh was stained rust
colored. The plastron was smooth as an old
stairway with long use. He made a low, irri
tated hissing sound, like a scuba diver exhaling.
"Can you just imagine how stressful this is
for him?" Harrel said again. "You realize that
UNMASKING THE SNAPPING TURTLE